


Bodies

by orphan_account



Category: Music RPF, Sex Pistols (Band)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-11
Updated: 2016-10-11
Packaged: 2018-08-21 19:52:55
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,041
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8258455
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: One can be haunted without ever seeing a ghost.[Written by Twi (kitre@agora.rdrop.com) and posted on femgeeks.net. This is archived here as a courtesy to readers.]





	

It wasn't so very long ago that things were _normal_ ; if not properly so, then in the relative sense at the very least. He had really been starting to get the rhythm of things. Instability was steady work. Now he feels like the singer for a band with no drummer, no bass, nothing to keep things going. He wonders how long this will go on, this sort of free-floating freefall. He goes walking for hours sometimes beneath the dead grey England sky until he feels submerged, indistinguishable from his surroundings, like he could blend in perfectly with the pale concrete walls. He's been looked right through more than once, not just as if he wasn't famous, someone ordinary, but as though he wasn't there at all. He feels sometimes like he could disappear altogether, fade into the dreary London fog. It's beginning to be when he feels at home.

Right now, though, he's at his flat, lying in bed, and he can't sleep. He's remembering when everything still had colour, when everything was red: Red as blood spat up from a torn smacked gob, red blinding lights on a smeared stage; red as his face and his hair reflected in those lights, reflected in the eyes of a numberless horde of screaming faceless boys and girls. Red like the hell the furious protesters had condemned them to, as if they'd ever believed in anything so boring, a fable told by parents to get them to behave. This was how it was, had been. It had been wild, right, though maybe not as much as the legends he knew were already springing up around them might claim. Jumping on red-spread beds in a closed shop in filthy mud-caked boots when they were younger; there were lit fags in hands and seared sore marks on thin wrists.

There had still been an almost-fresh red series of scratches across Sid's chest when he'd gone to see him, the last time. It had all been about that, somehow, red even in livid lips on a face blank and empty as the morgue. Sid didn't look all that different dead than he had alive, he remembered thinking with queasy bemusement. They'd had the decency to close his eyes; he'd almost wished they hadn't. There had been a rust-coloured floret of dried blood staining the inner bend of Sid's elbow, spattering out, the hole the needle left seeming huge, gaping. Even next to all the other little scars Johnny could tell exactly which one it was, a neon sign lighting the site of a murder.

He would have to make it all go out with a bang, so to speak. He would be the final nail. He wasn't at all certain if the look on Sid's face, nearly peaceful, was his imagination or not.

“You always had to make things more than they were,” he says. To the air? To himself? To Sid? He isn't really sure. Like everything else had been, it had had to be swift, a quick, dirty, irrevocable thing. Everything had gone down the drain too fast to blink. Had he caused it, breaking up the band, or had they been on this path all along? He can almost see the dirty footprints staining the sheets. He'll put on his jacket sometimes and catch a faint whiff of Vaseline and powder, the stuff Sid used to keep his hair up, and he'll just stop dead. He'll look in the mirror and see black spikes instead of red.

“Who, me?”

He wakes and Sid is sitting by the side of the bed, shirtless, the leather trousers he seemed to always wear shining dully in the dark. The scars are still there, the letter “A” marking his chest like a brand.

“I dreamed you were dead,” he says.

“Of course I'm dead, mate,” says Sid, leaning forward, and he can see the empty black holes where his eyes used to be, the syringe that had carried him off still hanging out of his arm. “What'd you expect me to be?”

“This isn't real, then,” he says, frighteningly lucid. “I'm dreaming that I'm dreaming. How relentlessly banal.”

“Well, yeah. But don't look at it so negatively, luv,” Sid replies. “Think about it like this: nothing we do here matters.” He slithers forward on the bed, cherry-ripe mouth full and wet in the dark, a devouring god of destruction. “Give us a kiss...”

Johnny Lydon, formerly Rotten, formerly Lydon, wakes a second time, this one real, the beginnings of a cold sweat clinging to his temples. His cock is painfully hard. He lies still in the darkness for some immeasurable length of time, staring up at a ceiling his eyes can't quite see, before reaching down. He can't help it. He tells himself that, at least, and he does so over and over. He keeps his eyes closed tightly, mind carefully blank, but he can't seem to banish Sid's face.

Afterwards he lies shuddering, the cold air coming in through the window he left open before he fell asleep chilling his bare skin, reminding him of how very vast and *empty* the night is. This isn't the first time he's done this, and he knows it never changes anything. But he can't help sleeping, or dreaming, and he can't help that the dream always seems the same, variations on a theme. He wakes up and he craves, and lacks the willpower to keep from wanting or giving in.

He laughs to himself, somewhat hysterically; he was always the one calling *Sid* the junkie. Accurately, in a purely technical sense. And all the while, his own addiction was lurking under the skin, waiting to surface. He's beginning more than ever to understand desperation.

There are cigarettes on the nightstand, and a lighter. He lights one, the smoke soothing, calming him somewhat, until the taste of copper on his tongue drowns it out.

He pulls the cigarette away from his lips, swiping a hand across his mouth, and is only dully surprised when it comes away red. He's bitten himself. A flower of blood in the dark...

So it still comes down to that, he thinks. Even now.

Maybe there is such a thing as Hell, after all.

end.


End file.
